Dara and Ed's Great Big Adventure

Given Top Gear’s recent HR issues (you may have read about them), could Dara O’Briain and Ed Byrne be next in the driving seat? Probably not, if this rather tepid pass at a blokey celebrity road trip is anything to go by.

The show finds the Irishmen following in the tyre tracks of three Detroiters who, in the 1940s, became the first people to drive the Pan American Highway all the way to Panama.

This was quite a task in age when the Pan American Highway didn’t actually… you know, exist – hence the plentiful archive footage of the trio’s Plymouth sedan being winched up mountains and hauled across rivers by mules.

Today, the route is a well-maintained expressway cleaving through the Americas – which is great for local trade, less great for comedy TV travelogues. So the nearest thing to an actual incident we got here was Dara having an attack of the heebie-jeebies because Ed stopped the truck on a bridge – a moment of high drama not dissimilar to queueing for the tolls at the Dartford Crossing.

Instead, our heroes had to fall back on the laziest kind of cultural tourism which, this first episode being set in Mexico, involved drinking tequila, getting pinned to the floor by a lucha libre wrestler and being serenaded by a Mariachi band – who Ed, naturally, declared to be ‘flatter than a tortilla’. I half expected a cameo from Speedy Gonzales.

At one point, it all went a bit I’m A Celebrity when Dara was forced to eat an iguana’s head for breakfast. His verdict? ‘It tastes like chicken.’ Seriously, does every exotic meat taste like chicken? I can’t help thinking if you asked Hannibal Lecter to describe eating a prison guard, he’d do that funny thing with his teeth and then say: ‘It tastes like chicken.’

With Dara and Ed making for pleasant but not especially hilarious company, it was bit like being forced to endure a neighbour’s holiday snaps. At least Clarkson and co would have tried the mule method, or blown something up for no good reason. Probably while wearing a sombrero and being offensive to the locals. Actually, yeah – maybe Ed and Dara aren’t such a bad choice after all.

TV extra:

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